After Melanie Read online

  Suzanne glanced at her. ‘Are you all right, Judith?’ she asked. ‘You look very pale.’

  ‘Fine,’ she replied.

  But she was not fine. She moved slowly, struggling not to sink into a quicksand of sadness, the lingering residue of her fearsome dream and her anxious wakefulness. She realized that she was hungry, but the thought of food repelled her. Always, at times of stress, she had found herself unable to eat. In that, she and David were strangely similar.

  Helping Suzanne wrap coins in paper cocoons, she recalled a distant summer when Brian, still a small boy, experienced an asthma attack that could not be controlled by either inhaler or nebulizer. He had been rushed to the hospital and she and David had sat at his bedside in anxious vigil, willing each other to hope, willing Brian to recover. She remembered still the light touch of David’s hand upon her head, the softness of his lips when Brian’s breath finally came with ease and the color returned to his face.

  Satisfied that he had recovered, they had gone out for breakfast, an enormous diner breakfast – pancakes and eggs, croissants slathered with jam and butter. They had eaten voraciously, emptying carafes of coffee and ordering pie, ravenous because neither of them had been able to eat or drink during the long hours of anxious waiting.

  It occurred to her that David had ignored the carefully set breakfast table that morning because, beset by anxiety, he could not eat. The thought offered no relief but incurred a lingering sadness, a longing for the vanished days when she and David had held each other close in the aftermath of losses or disappointments. They had comforted each other over the betrayal of friends, professional and personal hopes inexplicably dashed, the deaths of their parents, all the cascading events of a long marriage. What was important to the one had been important to the other. She wondered if that mutuality of caring and sharing would be reclaimed. She wondered if she wanted that reclamation. The question haunted. No answer presented itself.

  She listened to the thrift shop chatter without interest as she moved robotically, silently, busying herself with small chores, moving a bin from one counter to another, folding scattered garments. Scraps of conversation floated toward her. Suzanne wondered what she might charge for the wedding gown. She knew of a consignment shop that handled only wedding gowns. Libby thought they should wait. The bride might yet reconsider. A customer asked if they had any maternity dresses. A child cried and would not be comforted.

  Judith went to the rack where the bridal gown hung. She zipped open the clear plastic garment bag and released the heavy long white dress, cradling it in her outstretched arms. It was of fine ivory silk. Golden butterflies embroidered in satin thread floated across the bouffant skirt. It was those sun-colored butterflies that sent hot tears streaming down her cheeks and ignited wild and irrational regret.

  She should have raced after the sad-eyed sisters and pleaded with the newly reluctant bride to reclaim the dress, to proceed with the wedding. She should have offered her Jane Austen’s insistence that a happy marriage was entirely a matter of chance. A chance should be seized. Never mind that one sister would be left behind. In time she would opt for a similar gamble and sail into uneasy, unpredictable marriage in that same butterfly-spangled dress. There were, after all, no guarantees, not in life, not in marriage.

  Austen, that spinster chronicler of likely and unlikely romances, had understood that every coupling was a unique novel, divided into chapters. Final chapters, both happy and unhappy, hung in the balance. That was, after all, what kept pages turning and hearts beating as sense and sensibility converged. She remembered discussing that with David, all those years ago, and she wondered if he had any memory of that conversation.

  She wiped her eyes and smiled wryly at the absurdity of her own thoughts. How could she have urged that almost-bride and her sad-eyed sister to seize upon Austen’s advice when she herself did not know how the final chapter of her own marriage would read? Or, indeed, how she wanted it to read. Should the final line be Judith and David lived happily ever after? Or They parted with great sadness?

  The ridiculous irrationality of her thoughts staunched any remaining tears. She returned the wedding dress to its plastic shroud. She was tired, she realized, so very tired.

  The thrift shop phone rang and Suzanne answered it. ‘Judith,’ she called. ‘It’s for you.’

  She hurried to take the call, hoping that it would be David. But it was Evelyn, apologetically canceling an appointment that Judith had meant to cancel herself.

  David would not call. She decided that she was not even sure that she wanted him to.

  She knew with sudden certainty that she did not want to remain in the thrift shop nor did she want to return home. She realized, with surprising clarity, exactly where she wanted to go. She turned to Suzanne. ‘I’m going to drive out to the Kahn house. There’s still a lot to do there,’ she said. ‘I’ll grab a yogurt on the way.’ She was, she realized without surprise, ready to eat.

  She picked up her bag and left, managing a casual wave.

  In the car, driving northward, she tried to remember if she had told Jeffrey she would come that afternoon, but it did not matter. If he was not at home, she would sit on the stone bench in his garden and watch the birds of summer congregate in the feeder that hung from the lowest branch of his flowering cherry tree. It was, she told herself, sylvan solitude that she sought.

  She parked in his circular driveway and saw at once that his car was gone and the front door was closed. He was not home. His absence did not disappoint her. She went into the garden where amber rays of sunlight danced through the thick-leafed branches of fruit trees and shone brightly on the garden that a dead woman had planned and planted with such care. Vegetables and flowers were interspersed. Tall irises, in all their purple splendor, towered over dwarf tomato plants heavy with ruby-red fruit. Pale green cucumbers dangled from delicate vines. Wands of dill waved in the slight breeze and bright green sprigs of parsley gleamed in the dark, well-watered earth. Jeffrey weeded diligently and harvested carefully. He was, she knew, in all things, diligent and careful, a devoted custodian of his wife’s bright and fragrant legacy.

  Judith realized that she was hungry, very hungry. She had not, after all, stopped for yogurt. She plucked one tomato and then another, and ate them swiftly, allowing juice and seeds to run down her chin. She crunched a cucumber, chewed on sprays of dill and parsley, then turned on the garden spigot, cupped her hands and filled them with clear cold water. She drank deeply. Satisfied, newly calm, she was overwhelmed by a haunting fatigue. Of course she was tired. She had barely slept the previous night. She stretched out on the stone bench. Indifferent to the hard surface and blanketed by sunlight, she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  She awakened to his touch on her face. Jeffrey very gently wiped away the tomato stains on her chin. Flustered, she sat up and laughed nervously. ‘I’m sorry. I fell asleep waiting for you. What time is it?’

  He glanced at his watch. ‘Three o’clock.’

  She gasped. She had been asleep for two hours.

  ‘I must have been really tired,’ she said. ‘And I’m afraid I looted your garden.’

  ‘I hope you enjoyed whatever you ate. The tomatoes are especially good this year,’ he said soberly, but his lips twitched in a barely perceptible smile of amusement.

  ‘They are. They were,’ she agreed. ‘I wasn’t sure whether we were supposed to meet today but I took a chance and drove out.’

  ‘No. I think we had agreed on tomorrow, but I’m glad you’re here. It’s a relief not to come home to an empty house.’

  She said nothing. She did not want to tell him that she herself had wakened that morning to an empty house.

  ‘We still have enough time to get something done,’ he said. ‘You mentioned going through Sylvia’s handbags next.’

  ‘Yes. Let’s start on them today.’

  She knew that sorting through that large accumulation would not be an easy task. Women were addicted to their handbags
. They were donated in great profusion to the thrift shop where Suzanne stored them in overflowing cartons in the back room, periodically selecting a few to be offered for sale. Only the previous week Judith had helped a wizened elderly woman rummage through an overflowing bin until she finally selected a small black leather bag,

  ‘Just big enough for what I need,’ she had said happily. Standing at the counter, she had transferred the contents of her larger battered bag into her new purchase.

  Two days later she returned and handed Judith two crisp hundred-dollar bills. She had found them, wrapped in Kleenex, in the zippered compartment of the bag. She had refused any reward.

  ‘I do not keep money that is not mine,’ she had said self-righteously.

  Suzanne had included the bills in that day’s receipts and returned the purchase price of the bag to the elderly customer.

  Judith was certain that there would be no hidden cache of bills in any of Sylvia Kahn’s purses. Sylvia had been too familiar with poverty to ever be careless with money.

  ‘I warn you, there’s a lot to deal with. Sylvia had a passion for handbags,’ Jeffrey said.

  She followed him up the stairs to the dressing room where he flung open the door of a multi-shelved cabinet. She gasped at the enormity of its contents. He lifted one bag and then another, handing each to her.

  ‘I don’t know why she bought so many,’ he said apologetically. ‘She would bring one home and apologize for buying it and tell me that she knew she did not need it but she couldn’t resist. She would return it if I thought she should. But I always told her it was fine, that of course she should keep it, and so she continued to accumulate them, year after year. She took wonderful care of them. She wiped the leather ones with a chamois cloth, massaged them with a special oil. I would sometimes stand in the doorway and watch her as she sorted through them. She sat on the floor, right here, examining one and then another, sometimes trying to decide which one to use that day, sometimes transferring the contents of one bag to another, occasionally simply rearranging them. I teased her, told her that she was like a child surrounded by toys, trying to decide which one she should play with. Stupid of me to say that to my Sylvia who had never had a childhood, had never owned a toy.’ His voice drifted from sadness into silence.

  ‘A lot of women have a handbag obsession,’ she said, careful to keep her tone light. ‘I can relate to that. I have too many myself. We carry around all sorts of stuff we’ll probably never need. Insurance of a kind, I suppose.’

  She glanced at her own bag, an oversized sack of soft brown leather, its contents so heavy it often caused her shoulder to ache. She chastised herself for carrying so many items yet discarded nothing. She took a mental inventory. There was a small leather folio of tattered photographs: David and herself on their wedding day, snapshots taken on vacations, studio portraits of Brian as a small boy and then in cap and gown at his college graduation, one of Melanie wearing her precious pink cardigan and smiling impishly, a frayed and fading Polaroid shot of her parents whose faces she could barely remember. A small leather address book, its thin pages crowded with the names of friends and acquaintances, relatives and colleagues, some crossed out, others underlined, was thrust in a separate compartment with the keys to all the way stations of her life – the house, the car, her office at the university. A red ribbon was looped around the key to the thrift shop.

  Her pigskin wallet bulged with credit cards and loyalty cards, cards for the local library and the university library, as well as a discreet amount of cash. Her insurance cards and driver’s license were in a thin case of red Moroccan leather that matched the pouch containing her makeup, gifts from Denise, ever anxious to please. And, of course, a pocket volume of Emily Dickinson’s poems, her ‘emergency’ reading. She read Dickinson in doctors’ offices, in supermarket lines and now and again while waiting for a very long light to change. She acknowledged that it was because she was too often unwilling to be alone with her thoughts.

  Once, hefting the bag, David had commented on its weight. ‘What do you have in there?’ he had asked.

  ‘My life,’ she had replied.

  It had not been a casual answer. She had thought then and thought now that the lives of most women might be revealed by the contents of their handbags. Surely that had been especially true of Sylvia, whose early life had conditioned her to be especially careful with those portable amulets of her existence. Jeffrey Kahn was wrong. She had not thought of her handbags and their contents as toys. The importance of official documents, her driver’s license and insurance card guaranteed Sylvia’s identity. Her house keys meant that she, who had lived in a fetid shack, had a home. Her handbags, obsessively purchased and carefully organized, their contents transferred with such care, offered reassuring proof of her late-gained security.

  Judith sighed and they began to work, faithful to their established routine. Like all of Sylvia’s possessions, the bags were carefully arranged and stored according to the season of their use. They began with those designed for winter. They were of different sizes and of different-colored fine leather, black and brown, deep maroon and dark blue, a cheerful red and a sober forest-green, some zippered, some buckled.

  Jeffrey handed them to her, one by one, and Judith opened each and stroked the faded linings on some of which the scent of face powder lingered. Satisfied that they were empty, she placed each one carefully in the yawning carton.

  They tackled those purses clearly meant for spring and summer, some crafted of fabric in pastel colors, others woven of straw, two envelope purses, one white, the other a bright yellow. In one she found a penny, in the other the dried petals of pink primrose. She left both the penny and the petals in place, snapped them shut and passed them to Jeffrey. But when she found a carefully folded handkerchief embroidered with the initials S.K. in a crocheted purse she handed the white linen square to him. He lifted it to his cheek. His tears dampened the delicate fabric and his shoulders quivered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It overwhelms me sometimes.’

  It. The word that substituted for death, for irrevocable loss, for grief uncontained. Words the bereaved avoided, words they feared. It was a substitute, however inadequate.

  ‘I understand.’

  She understood. Of course she understood. She went into the bathroom where she ran a wash cloth beneath cold water. He remained seated on the floor, a grief-stricken mourner frozen into rigidity, still clutching the handkerchief. She passed the cloth across his brow, then his cheeks, bringing it up to rest beneath his eyes. He moaned softly. His body uncoiled. He swiveled toward her, gripped her wrist and drew her toward him. Almost at once he released her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I needed – need – to touch someone, someone who cares. Someone’ – he stumbled over the words but spoke them at last – ‘who understands.’

  ‘I know,’ she murmured.

  She remembered how grateful she had been for David’s reassuring touch the previous night. The gentle stroke of his hands across her quivering body had banished the terror of her dream and, for that brief moment, restored him to her. Why, then, had he left their room and why had she not called after him? She supposed it was because they were mutually frightened, fearful of rejection which, at such a moment, might mean the death of hope. Jeffrey Kahn had no such fear. All he wanted from her was the transitory comfort of closeness.

  She took his hand and lay down beside him. Fingers clasped, they fell asleep and awakened to the gathering shadows of early evening.

  ‘It’s late,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t you be getting home?’

  She glanced at her cell phone. David had called more than once but he had left no messages. She called her home. There was no answer. Her heart sank. Where was he at this twilight hour? She feared the answer and did not call his cell phone.

  ‘I can stay for a bit,’ she said. ‘Coffee would be great.’

  He smiled. ‘I can do a little better than that,’ he said.
r />   She followed him into the kitchen where, with the swiftness of the solitary dweller, he prepared a salad, a platter of cheese and opened a bottle of wine. They sat opposite each other at the well-scrubbed table and talked easily. He told her that his younger daughter was in a new and what she described as a ‘serious’ relationship. She had not said much more.

  ‘And, of course, I do not ask too many questions. My daughters are adults. Their lives are their own. I understand that. But still I worry about them. Not constantly. Only every other hour.’ He smiled ruefully.

  She, in turn, told him that Brian and Denise had decided to marry sooner rather than later. They saw no reason to wait until Brian finished law school.

  ‘And you approve?’ he asked.

  ‘I think so. I’ve grown to like Denise and I think they’re right for each other. But my approval is hardly important. David and I recognize that.’

  ‘Of course not. We are only parents.’

  There was no bitterness in his voice, only the recognition that their children, grown and independent as they were, would forever inhabit the orbit of their concern.

  She nodded and remembered the Yiddish aphorism that when children are little they sit on a parent’s lap, and when they are older, they sit upon the heart. It was true. Both her children sat heavily upon her heart, Brian in life and Melanie in death. She hugged the thought to herself.

  He told her that he had met with Emily’s husband. ‘An impressive young man. His med school record is excellent.’

  ‘Did you offer him the fellowship?’

  ‘I did. And he accepted it. He told me how grateful he was to you for befriending his wife.’

  ‘It’s a friendship that requires very little effort,’ she said.

  ‘You have a talent for making even difficult things seem effortless.’

  He reached across the table and touched her hand. She stared at him and too swiftly pushed her chair back and sprang to her feet.